An increasing number of investigators in the life sciences at the University of Virginia are using images as one modality for their analysis of different aspects of biological systems. Funds are therefore requested to update and expand the limited image processing equipment presently available which consists of a Zeiss Videoplan and a Zeiss Zonax system. Because the needs of different users vary with respect to the complexity of the analyses required, a flexible, expandable and distributed system with hierarchically organized levels of intelligence is proposed. The high quality input equipment includes additional video equipment as well as a high resolution microdensitometer. An LSI 11-23, a PDP 11/70 and the CDC-Cyber 730 Dual Processor of the Academic Computing Center at the University of Virginia will be used for data processing in increasing order of complexity. The image processing facility will initially serve 20 users with 22 research grants from the School of Medicine, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Science in research activities covering a broad spectrum of the biological and medical sciences. Eleven projects deal primarily with two-dimensional analysis of complex mixtures of proteins and 11 involve the analysis of the size, composition and motility of cell bodies, of the constituents of tissue samples or of the geometry of complex anatomical structures. Because of the power and speed of computerized processing of biological images, such a facility is expected to have a marked impact on the productivity of the users as well as on the level of quantification of their results.